


Meeting Myself (And Maybe You)

by Her_Madjesty



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Angst, Daemons, F/M, Gen, Growing Up, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23272915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: The Golden Deer, their many daemons, and the taming of the Ashen Demon.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth & The Golden Deer, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 60
Kudos: 139





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Still getting back into the groove of writing fanfiction, but it's nice to come back to. This first chapter is more of a taster than anything else. We'll introduce Byleth, the shipping, and the meat of a daemon-oriented Academy-phase in the next little bit. 
> 
> Warnings not used on this piece, but note that there are minor, undetailed mentions of torture.

_I am reaching/ for the [person] I am becoming/ for the [person] I've always been/ for the [person] who lies underneath/ all of these layers - Layla Saad_

I. Hilda

Fonzie settles when Hilda isn’t looking, which he thinks is probably for the best. He’s spent all her life, after all, making himself small; the bout of temper and pig-headed stubbornness that jolts him from his softer form is the last thing he expects – if not the last thing he wants.

Hilda, on the other hand, would have much preferred to see the change. At the time, she remembers a red tinge around the world; an unforgiving bubbling in her chest that turned into despair when she turned and saw her dandelion-colored puppy nearly twelve times his original size.

After all, what kind of impression was she going to give off to all the other stuffy nobles parading around a boar?

“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Fonzie insists, snuffling at the hem of her dress just before she bursts into tears. He tries to curl up in her lap, like he did before, but his new hooves drag dirt and bruises onto her thighs.

Hilda desperately tries to drag him into her lap, anyway, her tears turning her pale skin blotchy. The sound of her desperate sobs send the staff nearby running so quickly that even her brother, in the middle of a meeting, hesitates before entering the room with her.

If it had been anyone else, Hilda feels certain he would have laughed. After all, what could’ve been funnier than a pink-haired flower clutching at a boar with tusks the size of dinner knives?

But Holst, Goddess bless him, hadn’t laughed at her. Awkwardly, as only an older brother can, he sat next to her and rubs her back until the worst of her tears subsided. Allora, his over-large elk, lingered in the doorway, a steady presence even as shock registered in her otherwise-gentle eyes.

“It isn’t so bad,” Holst tells Hilda through her hiccups. “And you’re clever, Hild – if it really is a problem, you’ll figure out how to handle it.”

It’s not something any older brother should say to his ten year old sister, and especially not to Hilda. Her tears start all over again, and Holst is left staring helplessly at Fonzie, who can do nothing but stare back.

(It takes her so long to get used to him following her, like a new, over-sized shadow. In time, though, they fall into a rhythm; Hilda with her girlish smile and Fonzie with a bow tied around his neck. No matter what, she never hides him away. He always enters a room at her side, and she learns to use the confusion of the nobles around her to her advantage.)

II. Marianne

No one is surprised when Margrave Edmund’s adopted daughter goes into hiding. The rumors that have been circulating since her arrival grow robust with their tellers’ satisfaction – after all, who wouldn’t be a little bit smug, having predicted the girl’s monster of a daemon?

Marianne, horrified, spends the two months after her daemon settles tucked away in a corner of her adopted father’s estate. For the first two weeks, he stays all the way across the room, staring at her with yellow eyes that don’t grow any softer in the dark.

All considered, Fritz isn’t an especially large wolf. When compared to the ones roaming the woods beyond the estate, he’d even be considered a runt. To Marianne, though, who’d kept him as a mouse against her chest for the whole of her life, he’s the perfect picture of everything she never wanted to be.

“It’s okay,” Fritz tells her, his voice a low rumble in the darkness of the room they share. “It’s still me, Mari. It’s still us.”

Marianne’s tears will never match the theatrics of Hilda’s. They slide silently down her cheek, only drawing an intake of breath when Fritz dares to try and come closer.

The first two weeks are painful. As two turn into three, Marianne’s resolve begins to crack. When, one morning, she wakes with her face buried in her daemon’s fur, she nearly starts to sob all over again.

When she arrives at Garreg Mach, Fritz bears a simple collar, and anyone who asks is told, in no uncertain tones, that he is just a large dog. Fritz growls where Marianne stammers, though, and the image is – disconcerting, to say the least.

(It won’t be until several years have passed that Marianne will remove that collar, will throw it behind her as she and Fritz walk from a monster-infested wood unharmed, a little shaken, and with an unholy sword between the two of them.)

III. Ignatz

His parents have a matching set of mourning doves that Ignatz watches all throughout his childhood. Layla tries to match them in their easy grace, but she can never quite manage, tripping over the air’s uneven currents or an unruly set of paws.

When she does eventually settle, it’s an unremarkable thing. It’s not even him who notices that she hasn’t changed shape in a while, but Raph, on one of the nights their families come together for dinner.

“Hey!” he says, reaching out a hand with a broad smile. “Looks like she’s finally picked a shape!”

His booming voice draws the attention of the rest of the party, and before Ignatz has a chance to react, both families have come together to stare at his little bird. Well, not so little – he can feel Layla’s talons digging into his shoulder from the sheer stress of all of the newfound attention.

Later, when the revelry is winding down, he feels her peck at his ear. “This is good, right?” she asks, her voice so soft that he knows he’s the only one who can hear her.

Ignatz looks up at her. She’s a beautiful pygmy falcon, brown dappled feathers blending gently into the white of her underbelly. Her coloring is almost enough to make him overlook the golden hook of her beak and the sharp pins of her talons.

“It – it will be,” Ignatz says with a nod. “I like you just the way you are, and I always will. You know that.”

Layla preens – the first time he’s seen her do that since he turned eight. Ignatz can’t help but smile and ruffle her feathers, even though he receives a nip for his friendly efforts.

IV. Leonie

Leonie divides her life into two parts: before Jeralt and after Jeralt.

Before Jeralt, her Ulysses was whatever he needed to be: a plough horse when her family’s got sick, a falcon when she needed to hunt, a cat on the nights when her little brothers needed a tail to pull.

But then Jeralt arrives. And in the weeks he stays, and in the months after he’s gone, Ulysses is a perfect mirror of his over-large bear. The two of them tear down the dirt paths together, giggling and gathering sticks to turn into swords.

In those months, Leonie is convinced that her daemon has finally settled.

But then, the merchants start to dry up. Food becomes scarce. She spends more and more time in the woods, trading out her stick-made swords for berries and whatever rabbits she can find in the underbrush.

The first time Leonie’s family goes without eating dinner, she wakes to find not a bear but a little hound sleeping beside her bed.

It’s a blow. Leonie sinks to the ground beside Ulysses, her hands fluttering around his little body, gripping for a security that isn’t there anymore.

“What happened?” she demands, shaking the little dog awake. “Did I do something wrong? Change back; change back now!”

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?!” Ulysses looks at her with wide, confused eyes. Only when he reaches out and sees a paw smaller than Leonie’s own hand does he seem to understand.

The two of them sit together, staring at the contrast.

Leonie doesn’t cry.

Leonie doesn’t say a word.

Instead, she closes her eyes and squeezes them tight, willing – willing – for Ulysses to shift back.

A wet nose presses against her hand. When she gasps and opens her eyes again, there’s Ulysses – still a hound. Still too small for even her small bedroom.

Her parents find her there in the morning, tear tracks drying on her cheeks. Ulysses, for the first time in their lives, looks uncertain.

In the days that come after, though, he still follows her around their village. Leonie may wince at the shocked stares of their neighbors, but Ulysses does not. He holds his little head high, and Leonie learns how to, too. It just – takes some time.

She teaches him to carry a bucket in his mouth. He delivers fresh fruit and vegetables to the worse-off of her neighbors.

He’s at her side as she crosses the threshold of Garreg Mach. He’s with her, whole body tense with anxiety and delight, when the Blade Breaker comes back into her life.

Jeralt smiles down at the both of them, a fleeting thing, before guiding a blue-haired stranger towards the waiting archbishop. Leonie waits for him to turn back, to say something about Ulysses – but he’s there and gone in a moment, his rugged brown bear trailing after him.

The two of them stand there for a long while after the doors to the archbishop’s chambers close, waiting. When the sun starts to set, somewhere out in the courtyard, a tender piece of Leonie’s pride cracks along old fractures.

She turns away from the door with a huff, not looking back at it nor at her little dog. Ulysses hesitates, watching her back tense as she storms away and back towards the student dorms.

Only when she’s finally out of view does he follow her. He keeps his pace slow and his ears low to the ground.

(He’s used to this, even though Leonie herself is not. Come evening proper, he knows she’ll apologize, and he’ll still love her for her pride, but it’ll still feel like something’s missing when she cuddles him to sleep.)

V. Raphael

Cassandra is born alongside him, over-large, taking up too much room in the little house the Kirstens called home. For the first few weeks of Raphael’s life, she is a baby boar, nearly double the size of Raph himself. For several months afterwards, she plays at being a bear cub, her little paws unspeakably adorable, save for her sharp claws.

Raphael’s mother, exhausted from a birth that had taken nearly two days, stares up at the ceiling while her own little cat curled up on her chest. “What the fuck have you done to me?” she demands of her husband. Her only answer comes in the form of the man’s warm laughter and her son’s joyful coos.

Even so, Cassandra settles when Raphael is young. They’re on the road, and their dearest ox – an older boy, far past him prime – keels over in the noon-day sun. Before they can even get out of the cart, Cassandra is on the ground, her bear paws traded out for a pair of sturdy hooves.

After Raphael and his father drag the old ox to the side of the road, she gently lowers her head so Raphael’s mother can lower a yolk over her head.

“Well,” says his father, “she’s not like any ox I’ve ever seen, but I suppose she’ll do.”

Raphael, who can feel the weight of the yolk as though it’s on his own shoulders, still manages a hearty laugh. “She’s not an ox, dad,” he says as their wagon starts to move again. “She’s a buffalo. Can’t you tell?”

It’s a rare moment of clarity that shocks him, even though he’s confident that he’s right. His father stares, then looks at the tight curls covering Cassandra’s broad shoulders.

Raphael grins out at his oldest friend, then pats her gently on her nearby flank. “Let’s go, girl,” he says. “We’ve gotta get those muscles of yours big and strong!”

(Cassandra doesn’t talk, her quiet a manifestation of those few, rare things Raphael doesn’t like about himself. It’s only when the two of them find Marianne, with her collared wolf and her ease with birds, that Cassandra starts to speak at all.)

VI. Lysithea

The years in which a daemon settles are precious ones, ones meant to be filled with memory. With meaning. If all goes well, they’re even ones filled with peace.

But for Lysithea – well.

At the least, she can say this: for all the months and years she spends underground, no one manages to take Kristoff from her side.

He doesn’t settle down there. Of course he doesn’t; the stress, the screams, and the sheer dissociation Lysithea feels from her body barely lets him appear at her side, let alone choose a form to take. For longer than she likes, he is a little white mouse, but more often, he is a vole, a butterfly, a spider with a vicious bite. For one beautiful day, he is a snow leopard, and the two of them tear through Solon’s minions until they catch and sedate her.

When she is finally released, it takes her a full year to learn how to walk again, let alone hold a conversation and explain to anyone who asks why her daemon still hasn’t settled.

Whatever form he takes, though, he always comes to sit beside her when they make their way out into the world. He stays on her lap through painful family dinners and hisses at her father whenever “that dreadful time” makes its way back into conversation.

It isn’t until the week before she leaves for Garreg Mach that Kristoff deigns to settle at all. Only after another family dinner – another night of held-back tears and of passive-aggressive comments around the table – that Lysithea flees, making her way back to her small room with all the speed she can manage.

When she goes to bar the door, it is Kristoff’s small, clawed paws that help her move the dresser in front of the lock. She presses her back to the wall and gathers him in her lap, studying his stark, white fur as she listens for her father’s footsteps.

“A badger?” she asks, sharp and shrill. “Well, you’re certainly not what I expected you to be.”

To her surprise, Kristoff snorts. Outside the room, she hears her father’s footsteps come to a stop.

“I needed to be something, didn’t I?” he asks, self-righteous. “We may not be lions or tiger or bears or even those nasty little snakes down in the dark. But we’re here, and we’re not going anywhere.”

Despite the stress of the evening, Lysithea smiles. “Right,” she says, drawing him in again. Kristoff nuzzles against the bottom of her chin as her father knocks on her door, his quiet but firm voice demanding that she rejoin her family at the table at once.

Lysithea pulls her knees to her chest and breathes in Kristoff’s pine tree scent until the hall outside her room falls blissfully silent.

VII. Lorenz

Alexandria changes her shape to fit the season for most of Lorenz’s childhood. It’s a wonderful trick, or so he thinks, until the other noble children's’ daemons start to settle. Then, Alexandria’s flexibility becomes a burden – one that Lorenz is quick to snuff out.

Or – well, he tries.

“Come on!” he demands, late one lonely evening when it’s just the two of them in the Gloucester estate. Mother and father have gone north to Derdriu, and the staff has long learned that young Master Gloucester is more than capable of handling himself. “You can’t keep playing forever, ‘Dria. We have to settle. If we don’t, we reflect poorly on father, and that will go over badly with everyone.”

For a moment, Alexandria is a poodle, her nose up in the air like she’s the master of the estate. “Any attention is good attention,” she insists before shifting again, this time into a beautiful hummingbird.

“You know that’s not how this works,” Lorenz chastises her. “Come, now. Choose a shape. It can’t be that hard.”

The hummingbird levels him with a withering look. Lorenz feels the color start to rise in his cheeks, and he looks away. Outside his balcony window, the moon rises high in the evening sky.

Alexandria comes to land on his shoulder. With a gentle, magical sigh, she’s a golden lemur, her tail curling around Lorenz’s neck. He feels her hands start to graze through his hair and almost involuntarily relaxes.

“Be calm,” his daemon instructs him. “I will settle when I choose to settle, and when you are ready for me to do just that. Until then, I’m not worried about the whims of your father. I’m worried about you.”

“Why you bother, I should wonder,” Lorenz says with a huff. Even so, he doesn’t argue when her gentle caresses turn into braids. He wakes in the morning with a crown around his head and Alexandria at his shoulder, her golden fur radiant in the light of the sun.

(And, despite all of her protests, she stays that way.)

VIII. Claude

There are a lot of things Khalid hates about growing up in Almyra. The stares he gets when he plays in the market; the talks his parents have behind closed doors that they pretend he can’t hear; the sash that his father ties too tightly around his head and that his mother has to fix all day, every day.

So, yes, his childhood has its black spots – poisonings and political machinations and early bedtimes notwithstanding. The one thing he doesn’t hate, though, is Aahil.

Her black feathers take in sunlight like nothing else in the world, and on the worst of the days of summer, she’s almost painful to touch. Khalid loves on her, anyway, feeding her whatever tasty things he can steal from the kitchen or find while leaning out of his windowsill to stare at the city below.

She never struggles to settle. According to his mother, one minute she was shapeless, and the next she was a crow.

“It seems,” his father tells him one night over dinner, “that I’ve at least inspired some confidence in you, boy. That must count for something.”

Khalid would go so far to argue that his father had little to do with it, given that it was his mother who did all the hard work. As he gets older, though, he finds its easier not to bring the fight straight to his father but rather to let the world do the bringing – and the fighting – for him.

In the days before he arrives at Garreg Mach Monastery, he gathers Aahil’s loose feathers to his chest, weaving them together into a talisman to wear around his wrist.

“We’ll have to change your name,” he tells her, the name “Claude” already sitting heavy and uncertain on his tongue.

Aahil clicks and buries her beak behind his ear, pecking at his thin skin. Khalid – Claude – bats her away with a laugh. “Don’t whine!” he says, watching as she dances away from him. “Come on – pick a name. Any name.”

She doesn’t talk as much as he does, his Aahil, but then again, he’s never needed a chatterbox to voice the thoughts constantly swirling in his own head. Now, though, her silence feels heavy. It grows heavier still as she comes to rest on his shoulder.

She only answers him when the first marble towers of the monastery come into view. “Call me Robin,” she says, her voice soft and low.

Claude lets out a bark of laughter. “You want to make all these people believe that you’re a crow called robin?”

If crows could shrug, Claude is certain that Aahil would. He shakes his head and flattens the feathers sticking upright on her head. She croons low in his ear, and he chuckles again. “Fine. Robin. But you’ll do the explaining if anyone asks me what’s going on there.”

Aahil snorts. Claude lets his fingers drag over her glossy feathers and turns his gaze back to the monastery. It catches the light in the noon-time sun, just like the towers of Almyra – like the towers in stories with princesses and princes alike stuck in their cells.


	2. Rumor Has It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are rumors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *makes vague motions at the chapter count* Look, I just...started writing, and then Claude wanted to keep talking, and now I'm here.

The role of house leader at Garreg Mach is more honorary than it is official. Even so, it does come with its perks. Claude feeds Robin a piece of his pheasant in the midst of a pre-school year dinner, all the while watching the Imperial princess and the heir to the Kingdom of Faergus exchange apprehensive looks.

“It’s been a long time, El,” says Dimitri, in between bites of what Claude assumes are potatoes. At his side, his pretty lioness stretches out, her claws retracted but her gaze sharp.

“I suppose it has,” Edelgard concedes. The hawk on her shoulder watches Robin while the princess herself watches Dimitri. Claude feels Robin shift – not uncomfortable, just distinctly aware of the larger bird’s sharp talons.

“And yet, I’ve barely had the pleasure of meeting either of you,” he interjects, taking another delicate bite of pheasant. “Riddle me this: is the tension political, or did you two have a falling out?”

Dimitri colors almost immediately, whereas Edelgard’s face goes blank. “Apologies, Von Riegan,” she says, almost sweetly. “Did you feel left out of the conversation?”

“No more than usual,” Claude says with a shrug. “I’m used to being an outsider.”

“We did not mean to make you feel that way,” Dimitri insists. “Please, forgive us. In truth, it has been quite a while since we’ve had a chance to talk, as well.”

Claude hums in acknowledgment, but lets the prince stew in the awkward moment of his own making.

This, he supposes, could be worse. With classes starting in less than a week, he has the opportunity now to scope out the monastery and to better get to know his peers. True, the rest of his house won’t arrive until a day before classes begin, but coming to understand this lack of balance between the other two house leaders...well….

Claude’s never been one to turn down an advantage.

“I think the last time I saw you was during that border visit a few months ago,” he says, at last, setting his fork to the side. “And your Imperial majesty, when did you last grace the Alliance with your presence?”

“I don’t think I’ve been north of Airmid in at least a year,” Edelgard deflects. “Perhaps shortly after you arrived in Derdriu?”

“Perhaps,” Claude agrees. “It is a shame we didn’t stay in contact.”

Edelgard hums and takes a long sip of her tea.

Claude resists the urge to lean back in his seat and smirk at both of them. They’re an interesting pair, he’ll give them that. At his ear, Robin titters and shifts under the Imperial hawk’s gaze.

“Well,” Claude continues when the silence drags on too long, “at least we’ll have a whole year to make up for lost time.”

“Indeed,” Dimitri says, with another look at Edelgard.

“It should be a productive one, to say the least,” the princess agrees.

*

By the time the rest of the students arrive, the initial conversations between the house leaders have all but slipped Claude’s mind. He ends up walking through the front gates with the rest of his peers, as well – though not for reasons he could have anticipated.

The leaders’ excursion out to Remire may have threatened to end badly, but its outcome was clearly worth the initial threat. At the head of the pack of leaders, Claude watches a blue head bob and a stern mouth flatten into an even more critical line. Above his head, Robin circles the crowd, keeping an eye out for any bandits on the road,

Or, at least, that’s what Claude tells the Knights who ask him about his daemon. In reality, Robin hovers just a breath too close to the blue-haired mercenary, her dark eyes lingering on pockets and saddlebags.

There’s no way, after all, that someone can’t have a daemon. She has to be hiding hers somewhere.

Claude frowns as Robin dives in again, only to have his train of thought broken by a startled voice.

“Is that…?”

He turns to find a young woman, just to his left, with orange hair bright enough to rival the sun.

“The Ashen Demon?” he prompts. “Yeah – apparently her father’s a big deal around here.”

The young woman looks at him with pure exasperation. “Uh, duh. He’s the Blade Breaker, for crying out loud. He hasn’t been seen in years!”

Claude raises an eyebrow. “I hadn’t heard.”

“What, do you live under a rock?” the young woman demands. “The Blade Breaker’s only the most famous mercenary in all of Fodlan. His daughter’s not bad, by any account, but no one can match him for strength or speed.”

Claude thinks back to that late night at Remire. “I suppose,” he admits. “But I haven’t seen the Blade Breaker fight. Her I have.”

The young woman’s eyes go wide. “You have? Where? How? What happened?”

Despite himself, Claude chuckles. “A story for another time, I suppose. I’m Claude, by the way.”

The girl hesitates at the sight of his outstretched hand, but then takes it in her own. “Leonie Pinelli,” she replies. Her little dog comes to walk next to her, and Claude blinks in surprise. Even so, he schools the expression and takes in the rest of the meandering crowd.

Dogs aren’t unusual among this mixed student body. He’s seen his fair share of labradors, poodles, and hunting dogs. Someone’s got a buffalo the size of – well, a buffalo, but she’s so quiet it takes him too long to pair the daemon with the person.

(Somewhere up ahead, Raphael Kirsten is fighting his own battle, desperately trying to get a boy in green to make eye contact.)

“So,” Leonie continues, falling into step at his side. “Are you a noble or a commoner?”

Claude doesn’t allow himself to start at the question. “What do you think I am?”

Leonie chuckles. “With an answer like that, you’ve got to be a noble. None of the folks I grew up would be half as cagey as to ask something like that.”

“Am I cagey?” Claude asks, mock-affront in his voice. “Miss Pinelli, I’ve been nothing but forthright.”

“Uh huh,” Leonie muses. She nods up into the air, where Robin’s doubled back on her search. “So – what are you looking for?”

Claude breathes out slowly through his nose. “Just getting a feel for the crowd, I guess.”

Leonie looks at him sidelong. “Really?” she asks. “Because if you’ve seen the Ashen Demon fight, then you’ve probably noticed something...off. Right?”

Claude leans in closer. “Do you know something?”

Leonie smiles. “I make a point of keeping up with the Blade Breaker and his kin,” she sniffs. “But yeah, the rumors are everywhere. The Blade Breaker’s got his big old bear, you know, but no one’s ever seen what kind of daemon his daughter’s got. Some folks say that she doesn’t have one at all.”

“That’s literally not possible,” Claude says, his voice flat. “If you don’t have a daemon, you’re part of the walking dead, and I haven’t heard anything about zombies in Fodlan.”

“I know!” Leonie lowers her voice. “That’s what makes it so weird.”

Claude hums, then whistles low beneath his breath. In a moment, Robin flies back to his side and settles on his shoulder.

“I don’t even know what kind of daemon she’d have,” Leonie continues, her voice growing distant. “She doesn’t look like she knows how to emote.”

Claude makes a noise in agreement, too distracted by Robin’s voice in his ear to properly respond.

“Nothing yet,” she murmurs. “But we’ll suss this out.”

“I hope so,” Claude murmurs back, growing quiet enough that Leonie pulls away. He rights himself, after, but her orange hair drifts just ahead of him as she tries to make her way closer to the Blade Breaker’s steady horse.

Ahead of them, the gates to the Garreg Mach cathedral start to open. Claude brushes his fingers over Robin’s soft feathers and steels himself as, in the distance, trumpets start to sound.

*

In a way, his first week as a student is almost peaceful. Claude settles into the rhythm of student life almost too easily, as though his path at the monastery has already been laid out before him.

It’s a surprise that the Ashen Demon is awarded a teaching position with the school, and even more so that she’d choose his house to teach, but hey -

He can roll with the punches.

He manages to avoid her while getting settled, sending all of the supplies in his various sacks sailing through his new room. He can hear her, though, making her way up and down the halls. She’s introducing herself, it seems, or letting herself be introduced by Manuela and the goose the woman keeps wrapped around her neck. Claude doesn’t know if he’s heard her say more than five words since she saved his life – and he doesn’t know if that’s good or bad.

The first night before classes, he sits down to pen a letter to his grandfather, chewing his bottom lip as he does. Before he can think of the first words to write, the ink on his quill dries and his gaze drifts out to the horizon.

There’s a library here at Garreg Mach. From what he’s heard, it’s vast. Surely a little bit of reading on the subject of daemons wouldn’t hurt.

After all, it’s not like anyone else would be up at this hour.

Claude lets his quill fall to the side and caps his bottle of ink. As quietly as he can, he slips from his room and takes to the falls, heading up, up, and up until he can spot the candles in the library’s windows.

*

He’s not the only one awake.

Claude’s not moved a foot into the library before he hears a noise by one of the shelves. He stops and holds as still as he can, hoping the shadows from the nearby candles can provide him with enough cover.

It’s her, because of course it is. Byleth Eisner, as he lives and breathes. She’s near one of the further shelves, too far back to see him properly. He can’t tell what she’s looking at, but there’s a stack of books on the table nearest to her, as well as an inkwell and a quill that seems well-used.

When she turns, Claude can see the barest hint of frustration in her face – but he has to really look to spot it.

The shock of pity that runs through him is a foreign thing. Claude shakes it off and does what he can to slip back into the hall.

He doesn’t know if she sees him. He doesn’t know if he cares. He stays in the hall for longer than he should, heart pounding in his chest and frowning as he tries to get it back under control.

“This is fine,” he murmurs into the quiet of the night. “I’ll just...start my research tomorrow.”

(In the library, Byleth’s quill stills in her notebook. When she glances up, she sees Claude’s shadow slip down the hall.

“Spying, was he?” says the voice in her head. “That one’s going to be trouble, just you wait.”)

*

He arrives early to their first class, beating the rest of the Deer by five minutes. A girl with the badger, Lysithea, is just behind him, and oh, how she scowls when she sees him in the front row. Claude waves at her and pushes out the seat next to him, only for her to settle a full table away. He shrugs and lets someone else fall into the seat as the rest of the classroom fills.

“Can you please get your feet off of the desk?” asks the child-heir to Gloucester territories. His golden monkey bears her teeth at Robin, but Claude waves her away.

“Class hasn’t started yet, Lorenz,” he says, “and I was up so early training, I need to stretch my muscles. Surely you can understand the practicality.”

Gloucester sniffs. Claude grins and folds his hands behind his head, staring until even Gloucester’s monkey is forced to look away.

His feet do drop, though, when their new professor enters the room.

The hush that falls over the students, he figures, wouldn’t be so unusual in another classroom. It’s the weight of everyone’s eyes, though, on their daemon-less professor that fills the air with...tension.

“Good morning,” their professor says, making her way up to the chalkboard. “It is...a pleasure to see you all this early.”

Somewhere in the back, the girl from Goneril – Hilda, Claude knows – snorts.

“I’ve met a few of you already,” their professor continues, unhindered. “But if you would, tell me your names, and those of your daemons. I’ll do my best to memorize them as quickly as I can.”

Lorenz and Lysithea already have their hands in the air by the time she’s done speaking, and she seems taken aback by their enthusiasm. Claude leans back as the class is introduced, watching the Ashen Demon with a wary stare.

There’s no daemon at her shoulder or lingering at the back of the class. He can’t see any movement beneath her clothes. By the time introductions make their way around to him, he feels like he’s been staring for years, but to no avail.

“Claude Von Riegan,” he says, letting his voice carry through the room. “You can call my daemon Robin.”

This time, it’s Lorenz who mutters a surly “Of course.”

“And what about you, Teach?” Claude continues, unrepentant. “What should we call yours?”

It’s a risky move, and not one, he knows, that’s going to endear him to her. Even so, he holds his ground as Byleth’s expression grows even colder.

“That’s a good question,” Hilda calls, somewhere near the back. “We haven’t seen your daemon at all, professor – is something wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” Byleth replies, but the moment takes...too long. With a frown, she pulls back the sleeve of her unwieldy coat. Claude has to squint to see what she’s holding as she raises her wrist, but after a moment, her daemon becomes clear.

First, he’s a milk snake, curled around her wrist. A moment later, he’s a rat snake, dark against her skin. A heartbeat passes, and he’s a ferret, squirming up her sleeve to move out of sight.

Someone in the room gasps.

“Teach,” Claude hears himself say, as though from a distance. “Your daemon – hasn’t settled? Just how old are you, anyway?”

Byleth lets her sleeve fall back down, allowing her daemon a respite. “Old enough to be offended by the question,” she says in a way that should be playful, should be something, but that falls flat and dead on the floor. “Should you feel the need to address my daemon, you may call him Wechseln.”

Claude feels out the name in his mouth, but the professor ploughs on with her introduction. By the time he thinks to ask her more questions, they’re in the middle of the lesson, and he’s already fallen behind.

“Wechseln,” Robin whispers in his ear. “Is that Srengian?”

“I don’t know,” Claude hums back. “I’ve never heard of anything like it before.”

*

The stories about Teach’s daemon circulate through the monastery more quickly than Claude could imagine. It’s not by lunch on his first day that both the Imperial princess and the heir to Fargeus have him cornered at a table.

“Her daemon hasn’t settled?” Dimitri demands, his own lioness pacing behind him. “What could that mean?”

“Does she need to visit Manuela?” muses Edelgard, holding her own hawk close.

“I honestly have no idea,” Claude admits, though even Robin’s feathers are fluffed with discomfort. “I don’t even think the thing was moving on her wrist. It was a little scary.”

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard of before,” Edelgard agrees. “Her father’s daemon seems perfectly normal. I can’t imagine...”

Claude stares at her as she trails off, but her gaze goes distant and dark.

“I don’t think it’s something I’m going to bring up again,” he continues, lying through his teeth. “At least, not in front of her students. She took it well enough, I think, but there’s a reason she’s been keeping him hidden all this time. This isn’t something she wants to be pestered about.”

“I’d imagine so,” Dimitri says. “To be so uncertain of one’s self at her age – it’s a wonder. I must admit, I’m surprised the Archbishop hired her knowing she was so unsure.”

“I’m surprised the Archbishop hired her at all,” Edelgard says, coming back to herself. “I’ve heard her father raised her with next to no knowledge of the Church. Can you imagine?”

It’s the most conspiratorial she’s ever been, Claude notes, and he’s both warmed and wary for it. “That woman’s a mystery, for sure,” he says, nodding. “Good thing I’ve got the rest of the year to get to know her, I guess.”

“I suppose,” Edelgard hums. A door opens at the other end of the mess, and the table of lords falls quiet. Byleth makes her way into the hall, deliberately – or unintentionally – ignoring the pockets of silence that follow her as she passes.

There’s no discomfort on her face, but Claude feels something sick start to swirl in his stomach. With a short bow to each of the lords, he rises and moves to fall into step beside her.

“Afternoon, Teach,” he says, injecting as much cheer into his voice as he can muster. “Not bad for your first day on the job.”

Byleth raises an eyebrow, but it seems to do the trick. Noise trickles back into the mess as they get into line next to one another, the tension in the air eased.

“So,” Claude continues when she doesn’t respond. “Any hints as to what your plan is for the afternoon?”

“Training,” Byleth says, grabbing a tray from the line. “I know a little about what you can do, but I’m curious to see where the rest of your class stands.”

Claude smiles, but he can feel the edges threatening to crack. “I’m looking forward to it. I know our little herd of deer will do their best to impress you.”

Byleth...pauses where she stands in line. “I’m not looking to be impressed,” she says, pulling a well-cooked fish onto her plate. “I’d rather you all be honest about your skills so I can best help you grow.”

Claude falters in the face of her admission, but does his best to regain his stride. “I wouldn’t go telling them that,” he says. “If you let students like Hilda off the hook, you won’t get anywhere at all.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Byleth replies.

It’s the clearest dismissal he’s ever heard, but Claude is loathed to take it. Even so, he offers her a short bow before leaving her side, weaving his way back across the mess.

At his old table, his seat’s been taken by Hilda, who’s in the midst of idly chatting with both of her opposing lords.

“What was that about?” she asks as Claude clears his throat.

“Just getting to know our dear professor a little better. Now, Lady Goneril, I believe you’re in my seat.”

“Oh, was your name on it?” Hilda turns to him and smirks. “So sorry, Duke Riegan, but someone had to keep it warm for you.”

It’s – almost endearing, the way she says it. Claude feels himself starting to smile. “I’ll be sure to take your application for professional seat warmer into account over the next few weeks.”

“Please do,” Hilda says, standing. “And tell the professor I’m all about it, while you’re at it. She’s a tough cookie, from what I’ve heard, and I’m not about the kind of work that sort of professor wants.”

“I’ll do my best,” Claude replies. By his feet, he sees Hilda’s boar staring at him, not quite glaring but not quite trusting, either. He nods to both parties as they leave the table, then sits heavily down in his unoccupied seat.

“Well,” he says to the remaining lords, forcing cheer into his voice, “it’s going to be a hell of a year.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” muses Edelgard, her gaze locked on their errant professor. “but I suppose we’ll have to see where it goes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think! 
> 
> Note: yes, crows are omnivores. While I'm certain Robin would like prefer some sort of insect, I figure feeding your bird daemon another bird could serve as a pretty powerful intimidation tactic for those who might be in the know.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “But Teach – about your daemon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish I had an updating schedule, but I don't! I hope you all enjoy this latest installment. It's always fun to write about the Golden Deer when my roommate's Blue Lions poster is staring at me, disapproving.

“You know,” Leonie says, sometime in the first few weeks of meeting him, “you could’ve just told me that you’re the grandson of Duke Riegan. You didn’t have to be coy about it.” At her side, Ulysses stares up at him, huffing as he circles their feet.

“Ah, but where’s the fun in that?” Claude asks. Leonie’s answering smack stings, when it hits his arm, but he isn’t bothered enough to fake a wince.

The dining hall around them bustles with the noise of an early morning. Across all of the tables, students have divided themselves up by houses, though there are no rules designed to separate them as such. Claude resists the urge to frown at the lot of them, if only just.

“Cagey,” Leonie says, setting her tray of food down next to him. “I knew you were a strange one.”

“You wouldn’t be the first to say so,” Claude admits. As the crowd settles in around them, he moves closer, Robin a cautious presence on his shoulder. “But speaking of strange things – what do you think about Teach’s daemon?”

The humor in Leonie’s face dies. Her expression shifts several times over and lands on something like disgust.

“I just – don’t know what to make of it,” she admits, poking at the potatoes on her plate. “I mean, she’s got to be in her early twenties. It doesn’t make sense that her daemon wouldn’t have settled by now.”

“That seems to be the general consensus,” Claude agrees. “And yet, here we are.”

“And to make matters more confusing, she doesn’t even seem bothered by it,” Leonie continues. “Could it be a medical condition? Or some kind of...I dunno, religious thing? I know Jeralt was never all that into the goddess; maybe the professor’s lack of a daemon is some kind of punishment?”

It’s the strongest theory he’s heard so far, and one Claude’s considered himself. Even so, he only allows himself to nod in agreement. “Whatever the case,” he says, “it seems like she’s plenty competent on the battlefield. Maybe it’s just a quirk to get used to.”

He leans back and lets the seed he’s planted fester. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that there’s tension between the professor and Leonie, even if it is one-sided.

“She’s certainly a good commander,” Leonie admits, begrudgingly. “I dunno. You’re the one spending all of your time in the library, aren’t you? You’ve got to let me know if you find anything.”

“You’ll be the first person I tell,” Claude lies, crossing his heart. Leonie rolls her eyes and takes a bite of her meal, effectively ending the conversation.

Claude lets his attention drift past his own food and out across the hall. Teach isn’t here, of course – ever since Ferdinand gave her that damned tea kettle, she’d been passing over lunch in favor of private afternoons with her students. He’d yet to be called himself, but he’d seen first Marianne and then Ignatz return from the pavilion in the afternoons. It may be a leap to assume he’s on the roster, but so far, it’s only been the Golden Deer that she’s called to her side.

She’s systematic, he’ll give her that, and he’s grateful – or so he tells himself – that without her eyes on him, he has time to think.

He hadn’t been lying when he’d applauded their Teach’s skills on the battlefield. Her intervention in Remire notwithstanding, she’d guided them to victory in their first mock battle against the other houses without so much as faltering. Her stalwart expression in the face of the obstacles that came her way was, in a word, disconcerting.

Claude bites back a frown and pokes at his breakfast, instead. Across the mess, he sees Edelgard with her head low to the table, flanked by Hubert and his rat snake. Her hawk clicks his beak, but the princess herself is too distracted, for the moment, to notice that she’s being watched.

Hubert, however, does. Claude flashes him a bright smile before turning back to his meal and receives only a glower in response.

Some of the talk nearest to the door of the mess falters. Claude doesn’t have to look up to know who’s caused the commotion.

Sure, the pockets of quiet that tend to pop around Teach are less frequent, nowadays. Even so, the student body seems to regard her with a wariness that leaves even the staff wrong-footed.

“Not gonna walk with her today?” asks Leonie through a mouthful of food.

Claude shrugs. “She is a mercenary, you know,” he says. “I imagine she’s spent a fair amount of her life dealing with the odd look or two.”

Even so, he feels Byleth’s gaze skirt over him as he refocuses on his food. The urge to walk beside her rises in his chest, but he stifles it with another bite of sausage.

“Maybe,” Leonie agrees with a huff. She plays with her food for a second more, then rises abruptly to her feet. Claude frowns as she dances away from the table, leaving her food behind. She offers him a subtle wave as she goes to stand in line next to their professor, confusion and sympathy warring for control of her face.

“Huh.” Claude leans back in his seat, watching the two of them fall into awkward conversation. “Would you look at that?”

*

It doesn’t take long for rumors of discontent in the west to overtake talk of Teach’s daemon. Even as she prepares their class for their first Church-sanctioned mission, though, Claude finds himself...distracted.

It goes like this:

There’s interplay amongst the daemons that sets each of the Deer apart. As they walk the halls of Garreg Mach and take to the field of battle, there’s no avoiding the way they’re drawn to one another. When Marianne, for example, takes to the field at the Red Canyon, Claude can track Ignatz’s falcon watching out for her overhead. As he strikes down one of the bandits that gets too close to Lysithea, he senses her badger tearing into the corpse he leaves behind.

But there’s Teach at the head of their pack. True, her sword arm never slows, and he never feels the threat of danger, despite the number of bandits they face. But as Robin flies close to her head, streaking forward in a dark blur, it’s...disconcerting. No snake snaps out to join Robin in her attack; no boar leaves hoof-prints on the bandits who’ve been struck down – no boar, that is, save for Hilda’s.

When Teach’s sleeves fall back, of course, he can see her little daemon – ever shifting, never sturdy – but the thing looks so still, even in battle, that it doesn’t seem fair to even consider it a part of her.

And so Claude continues to spend his nights in the library. True, he does his homework with as much enthusiasm as he can muster. But in the hours he has to himself, he digs through the archives for any and all information the Church has on daemons.

It’s late towards the end of his second month at the monastery when he first makes headway with his research. The candles in the library burn low, and, save for Lindhart, Tomas, and himself, the library has long emptied out. Claude bites back a yawn and reaches for his mug, instead, only to find that the tea he brewed for himself has long gone cold. Above his head in the rafters, Robin titters. Claude flicks her off without so much as a glance upward.

He sets aside the book he’s fingering through – _A History of Crests and Daemons in Faergus –_ and stretches, his back cracking all the while. He waves to Tomas as he makes his way towards the library’s second floor, intent on finding a stand to support his cup as he warms it over one of the still-glowing candles.

“Snuff the candles out once you’re finished, Master Claude?” Tomas calls. “I believe Master Lindhart is done on the second floor tonight.”

“Can do!” Claude calls back. As he climbs the stairs, he looks towards Lindhart’s corner – and yes, there’s the boy and his rabbit, both of them curled up close next to a tall stack of books. Claude huffs in tired sympathy and resumes his search.

When he returns to his table, some twenty minutes later, two things have changed.

One: there’s a new book set beside his pile. It’s loosely bound, and it bears no title on its cover.

Two: the library has another visitor. Claude narrows his eyes as Byleth peers at the shelves. Her face is as passive as ever, but he thinks, in the dark, that he can spot the barest hints of a frown around her eyes.

Claude moves slowly, setting up his tea stand as quietly as he can. He slips the newest book into his pocket, then comes to stand beside his professor without a word. It’s clear Teach notices him, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead, he watches her fingers trace over a series of books, all of them detailing ancestral histories that even he hasn’t bothered to look at yet.

“Looking to learn more about the Alliance?” he asks, voice quiet enough to break the silence but not disturb it.

Teach inclines her head, but it takes her a moment to respond. Claude waits, ever patient, as she pulls one of the most recent volumes down from the shelf.

“My father and I toured through Alliance territory last year,” she says, at last. “But we never bothered to learn more about the area than what we needed for our missions.”

“Ah, I see,” Claude muses. “So now that you’re teaching the heirs to the next generation, you’re doing your homework?”

He catches the barest hint of amusement in her face before she takes up her neutral mask again. “You could say that.”

Something shifts beneath her sleeve. Claude can’t help it; he glances down. Up in the rafters above his head, Robin clicks her talons against the wood and cranes her neck forward.

“Hey – how about this,” Claude hears himself say, as though at a great distance. “Those tomes are a bit of a haul. You can ask me anything you want to know about the Alliance, instead.”

He senses more than sees Teach’s gaze land on him. Her eyes narrow, and – maybe not for the first time, but it’s definitely one of the few – Claude feels exposed.

“What’s in it for you?”

Despite himself, he laughs. “What? You think I’d only offer to share if I got something for myself?”

Byleth doesn’t answer, just continues to stare.

Claude raises his hands in a mockery of surrender. “Okay, you caught me. You’ve got to admit, you’re kind of a mystery. I’ll happily answer any of the questions you have about the Alliance, but I’d love to learn a little more about you along the way.”

The stoic expression on Teach’s face drops into something like confusion. “...what do you want to know?” she asks.

Claude shrugs. “Come sit awhile,” he says, nodding towards his recently-abandoned table. “We’ll figure it out together.”

Realistically speaking, he doesn’t expect it to work. He has to fight to keep his eyes from going wide, then, when Byleth does as he asks. She takes her tome with her as she sits across from his stack of books, rolling up her sleeves as she does.

It’s an even bigger surprise when her daemon – Wechseln, was it? – slithers out and onto the table. He doesn’t stop shifting, of course – Claude sees him take on the form of a sparrow, then a mouse, then a sleepy house cat – but he moves more than Claude thinks he’s seen him in the entirety of Teach’s time at the academy.

When she catches him staring, Byleth’s frown grows even more pronounced. Claude hurries to sit down across from her, motioning with a free hand up to Robin. His crow comes to settle on the table beside him, staring all the while at Byleth’s slowly moving daemon.

“So, Teach,” he says, forcing himself to look her in the face. “Where do you want to start?”

Byleth watches him for what seems like an eternity, then crosses her hands over the tome in front of her. She flips through it, for a few pages, before settling on a map of Alliance territory. “Here,” she says, pointing to Ordelia. “This is where Lysithea is from, right?”

“Right.”

“And they’re...not all that large?”

Claude feels a smile tug at the corners of his mouth and schools himself with care. “That’s one way to put it. Let me explain.”

*

By the time Byleth is satisfied with her questions, the candles at Claude’s table have burnt low. His tea is long abandoned, but the tome in front of them is not. Byleth, to his surprise, broke out a quill and inkto better scribble in its margins not halfway through his first explanation of Ordelia’s roll in the Alliance. As their conversation stutters, he can see the notes she’s made. There are almost as many on the page as there is text in her book.

“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” he finds himself asking.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Byleth looks up at him, confused for not the first time tonight.

Claude opens his mouth, but the words he wants to say stick on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he clears his throat and idly scratches Robin between the eyes.

His Robin, thankfully, has kept her head about her. He doesn’t think she’s taken her eyes off of Byleth’s daemon all night. Wechseln seems...not comfortable, per se, but more active than ever before, now that it’s just the two of them. While he won’t get close to Robin, Claude’s seen him maintain a consistent shape for minutes at a time, now. It may not seem like much, but given Byleth’s occasional looks of surprise, it seems like progress.

“No reason,” Claude says, at last. “But I will say, Teach – I think you’ve been taking advantage of me. Think I can ask you a question or two now?”

Byleth pauses, then nods and shuts her tome. Claude doesn’t let himself lean forward, but the urge is difficult to resist.

“There are a lot I think you may have already guessed,” he admits with a pointed glance towards her daemon. “But let’s start with the basics. What were you and your father doing in Remire?”

“We’d just dealt with bandits in the area,” Byleth replies. “Finding more was...a surprise.”

Claude hums in understanding. “Were you moving into Kingdom territory, or just traveling for the fun of it?”

(It’s a wonder, he thinks, as Byleth’s face shifts again, that Rhea took it upon herself to hire this young woman; if she has an expression that’s not ambivalent confusion, he’ll eat an Alliance banner).

“We had a job to do in Kingdom territory,” she says. “The rest of the crew moved on without us, though we expect them back by the end of the year.”

Claude nods and leans back in his chair. He gives her a moment to recover, then another as a bonus, before ploughing onward.

The conversation, in truth, does little to sate his curiosity. If anything, the wee hours of the morning leave him wanting to know more. Byleth, to her credit, is as forthcoming as a stranger could be expected to be, if not more so. She doesn’t answer his questions in great detail and doesn’t offer up any extra information, but she rarely shies away from the conversation.

The monastery bells ring out twice by the time Claude realizes how much time has passed. His back is sore from the hard wood of the chair, and he twists, relaxing at the satisfying crack that echoes through the library.

Across the table, Byleth tilts her head and glances up, up, up, past beyond what he can see.

“One last question, Teach,” Claude says, repositioning. “And you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but I really would like to know.”

“It seems,” Byleth adds, almost as an aside, “that you want to know everything.”

He can’t help it; he laughs. Later, he’ll blame it on the hour and the ease, but for a second, Claude feels – happy.

“I suppose that’s a fair assessment,” he says. “But Teach – about your daemon.”

He doesn’t have to say any more. Byleth’s face doesn’t shutter, like he expected it to, but something about her seems to shrink inward. On the table, where Wechseln has been lounging as a wild cat, Robin squawks. Claude glances down to see the daemon start to shift again, all the while creeping backwards towards Byleth’s large sleeve.

“Everyone has daemons, Claude,” Byleth says – and boy, oh, boy, if that doesn’t sound rehearsed.

“You’re right,” Claude agrees, softening his voice as he does. “But you’re the first full-grown adult I’ve met to have a daemon that hasn’t settled. What’s going on there, hm?”

The mercenary across from him doesn’t back down. She does, however, move the fabric of her cloak back to let her daemon scurry into hiding again.

Claude waits. And waits. The silence threatens to smother him, but he’s learned how to be patient. He holds Byleth’s gaze and tucks every ounce of impatience behind an impassive mask.

Finally, Byleth looks away.

“I don’t know,” she tells him, rising from the table. She may not be a conversational master, but it seems even she knows how to signal when a conversation’s over. Claude’s mouth twitches with a frown, but he stands and begins to snuff out the candles around him.

“Funny, that,” he says, hovering over the final two. “It seems like nobody’s got an answer.”

Byleth hesitates – or maybe he just thinks she does, in the dark. She offers him a curt nod, then glances towards the door.

“Don’t let me keep you,” Claude tells her, with one candle left between them. Robin hops up to better settle on his shoulder. “I promised no more question – for tonight, at least.”

There’s something – a twitch of her cheek, maybe, or a twinkle in her eye – that eases a touch of the tension brewing in his chest. “Goodnight, then,” Byleth says, stepping away from the table.

“Sleep well!” Claude calls after her. He watches her fade into the shadows, only looking away when the door to the library opens and shuts again.

As soon as she’s gone, he picks up the tome she’s left behind. As quietly as he can, he stacks it on top of the title-less book, still sitting by his cold cup of tea.

“Was she lying?” he murmurs, fingers trailing over the bindings.

“I don’t know,” Robin replies. It sounds like _her_ voice, her not-answer, and Claude stutters over the final flame. He brings a shaking hand up to Robin’s feathers and soothes her ruffled ones, then blows out the candle at the desk.

The library plunges into darkness.

*

(It’s not until a few days later that Claude gets his answer. On his way back from the library, books tucked under his arm, he passes Captain Jeralt’s quarters and hears voices behind the door.

“So,” the captain says, his voice gruff. “Your...daemon.”

“Do you know why he won’t settle?” Claude hears Byleth ask. “I don’t mind the questions from my students, but they’re not satisfied when I can’t answer them.”

“I know, kid,” Captain Jeralt says with a sigh. Something – his bear, no doubt – sighs and presses its full weight against the door. “I wish I knew why it appeared when it did. I’ve been talking with Hanneman, and he has some theories, but none of them make real sense.”

Claude resists the urge to press his ear against the door. He forces himself to step away. Even so, he hears the last of the conversation as he backs up, intent on finding the closet staircase down the main hall.

“But why would I have one now,” Byleth asks, a world away, “when I didn’t have one before?”)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Byleth gets a word in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...hi.
> 
> This is the biggest con of not writing out my fics ahead of time. Apologies for disappearing for so long; I got sucked into "Much Ado About Nothing" fanfiction. I don't like leaving stories unfinished, though, so I'm here! I don't know when the next chapter will come out, but I'm here!
> 
> Tags for this chapter include: "Menstruation Mention" and "Labor," so keep those in mind as you're reading. We play with POV a little, as well, because I desperately needed to get this story out, and the sectioned-off viewpoints were the best way for me to do it. You can trust each section to contain a single POV save for the last one; there, change in POV is indicated by three asterisks (***).
> 
> Thank you all so much for your patience and your kind comments; I've enjoyed watching them come in. I hope this longer chapter makes up for my...nine month disappearance.
> 
> (At least it wasn't five years?)

1159, Great Tree Moon

Jeralt does not consider himself a hateful man. There is nothing, though – nothing – he hates more in the world than waiting.

The wait before a fight leaves his fingers twitching. He can feel the weight of his men’s lives on his shoulders, across his skin, in the crevices of his heart; their fears are his own fears, though he dares not reflect those feelings back to them. He stands firm at the helm of the Knights of Seiros and forces himself to breathe, to stare with confidence towards an enemy until the time comes to strike.

There is no such fight now. Now there is only a door, closed to him, and the sounds of panting labor behind it.

And again, Jeralt is twitching.

At his side, Ursa paces, her lumbering form unwieldy as ever in these too-small halls. Jeralt’s squire runs off to fetch him some ale, while the Church’s chief aide, Seteth, lingers nearby. He’s too refined, Jeralt thinks (with no small amount of exasperation) to press his ear to the door, but the two men share frequent, nervous glances across the quiet tiles between them. The little lizard on Seteth’s shoulder, Nila, has pressed herself up against her man’s throat, better, it seems, to measure the rate of his pulse.

A scream comes from behind the door. Jeralt moves without thinking, ready for battle, only for Seteth’s arms to hold him back.

“She’ll be alright,” the older man soothes, though there’s no small amount of strain in his voice. Jeralt fights, trying to shake off his arms as Sitri – his wife, his heart, the mother of his child – screams again, but the aide is stronger than he looks.

“Lady Rhea will keep her safe,” Seteth tells him, drawing the Captain of the Knights of Serios further back from the door. “This is normal, Captain; there’s no need to fear.”

Neither of the men know how wrong he is.

The shouting lasts long into the night until, abruptly, it stops. Jeralt, dazed with the lack of sleep and adrenaline, almost doesn’t notice the silence. Only when the lack of noise registers does he jolt up from his new-found spot on the floor.

He rushes the door, more a bull than a bear, but it does not matter. The Archbishop opens and closes it before he can enter. She carries a bundle in her arms – green and white fabrics swaddling a silent, small figure. The snake around her neck, like Seteth’s lizard, rests its head on her pulse point.

Jeralt stops himself before barreling into her, but it’s a near thing. It is not a moment for manners; he does not bow, does not incline his head. Instead, breathless and with the words punched out of him, he waits.

He stares.

The Archbishop looks between him and the bundle, her eyes impossibly sad. The silence in the hall is deafening; all-encompassing to the point where Jeralt does not notice the way her arms tighten around the bundle.

“What’s happened?” he demands, no trace of his usual gruffness in his voice. “Where’s Sitri?”

The Archbishop looks to her aid. Jeralt does not see the way Seteth’s expression fractures; he is too fixed on Lady Rhea’s face.

“Where’s Sitri?!” he demands, his voice breaking.

At his side, Ursa lets out a low, mournful wail.

*

Jeralt does not hold his newborn child until the next morning.

The Archbishop keeps the babe at her side as he runs to Sitri, as he rails and swears and weeps himself dry. By the time he comes looking for her, the Archbishop has found a bottle and is gently coaxing his child into eating her first meal.

There is a hole in his chest the size of a young woman. He stands in the doorway, listening to the Archbishop as she hums some strange song under her breath and wonders if it will ever be filled again.

Eventually, Lady Rhea looks up from her charge. There is blood beneath her fingernails, but her green and white snake has migrated down her wrist and is peering, now, at the bundle still held close to her chest.

Wordlessly, Jeralt steps forward.

He doesn’t move to take the child, rather comes to his knees at Lady Rhea’s side. Ursa moves in next to him – wordless, silent in a way she has never been in his life. She noses at the bundle, though; and it is she, before even Jeralt himself, who notices the possessive bent of the Archbishop’s hold.

Eventually, Lady Rhea clears her throat. “Would you like to hold her, Jeralt?” she asks.

Jeralt – hesitates.

(There is another future spiraling here – one where he leaves this child, these memories, this grief. There is an open road and thousands of miles he can put between himself and these feelings; there are worlds in which he can lock this away and never let himself feel this manner of heartbreak again.)

The moment passes. He nods.

Lady Rhea helps him position his arms before handing him his child. She keeps a hand close by, afraid, it seems, that Jeralt may drop the bundle.

But, in an instance, Jeralt’s body takes over. He cradles Sitri’s daughter to his chest, staring down at that dozing face and tracing the familiar lines of his wife in her nose and brow. The hole in his heart does not fill, but it changes, and love blooms so wild that he feels he may be overwhelmed by it.

After a moment, he looks around the room. He looks to Lady Rhea, his brow furrowing.

“Her daemon?”

Ursa noses the child as Lady Rhea looks away, her too-large snout almost obscuring the girl entirely.

When Lady Rhea answers, her voice is like a winter frost, killing the growth flourishing in Jeralt’s chest.

“She does not have one, Jeralt. I could not tell you why.”

“That’s impossible.” The words spill out of him before he has time to think. Jeralt stands, looks around the room. Ursa lets out another moan as Lady Rhea comes and places a hand on his shaking arm.

“There was no daemon in the room when she was born,” she says again, her voice softer. “But she is alive, Jeralt – alive. Isn’t that what’s most important?”

Jeralt looks down at his child. Her face scrunches up, but she makes no noise, sheds no tears as she settles into something like sleep.

He loves her – there is nothing in him that would keep him from loving her. But studying the planes of her face, Jeralt feels the first sting of confusion – and fear.

1167, Verdant Rain Moon

Byleth loves a number of things in this broad, wide world. She loves the taste of venison after a fresh kill, cooked at the hands of one of her father’s mercenaries. She loves the smell of crisp mountain air, but only when they’re in Faergus; Adrestia is too warm for her liking, and the Alliance air smells like sea water.

Above all else, though, she loves her father’s big, lumbering bear and the way Ursa’s fur feels under her fingers. The way her father tells it, it was Ursa who first made her laugh, and it remains Ursa who, of all of the mercenary company, she is closest with.

Perhaps that’s because Ursa doesn’t look at her like she has a second head, but that’s neither here nor there.

Byleth wakes on another morning out in the worldly woods somewhere between the Arundel and Gaspard territories. Ursa rumbles in her sleep, the perfect pillow. Byleth, briefly reluctant to move, slowly forces herself away from Ursa’s warm to blink blearily at the camp around her.

Most of the mercenaries have some manner of big cat or dog sleeping at their side. Few of them area awake save Counter, who’s on watch, and her ram, Constantine.

Jeralt – father, rather – is missing, but he couldn’t have gone far if Ursa is so close.

Byleth considers her options for a moment. Then, as quietly as she can manage, she slips away from Ursa’s side.

She’s careful to gather up her things before she wanders away from camp. Her father’s taught her the basics of the bow and the sword; she slips the latter into its sheath with all the care of an expert three times her age. She gathers rations for the day, then a canteen of water, and finally the small, fist-sized cage that she wears on her hip.

Inside of the cage, Moushen the Fourth, her little mouse, still sleeps, readying himself for a long day. Byleth sticks her fingers through the gaps in the cage and pets him behind the ears. He squeaks, eyes widening as he wakes, but lets her continue to pet him as she makes her way to the edge of camp.

She doesn’t remember how old she was when her father first fit her with Moushen’s great grandmother. He’d presented the cage to her on what had seemed like a random occasion while the two of them were still traveling alone, but just a few days before they’d joined with the rest of the corps. Byleth remembers Ursa huffing at her father’s side, looking at him with an expression than, on a human, would have been withering.

“This is Moushen,” Jeralt had told her, wrapping her hands around the cage. “Do not lose her; do not let anyone touch him. If anyone asks, you tell them that he is your daemon. Do you understand?”

Byleth knew about daemons. She knew that Ursa was her father’s and that people all over Fodlan walked around with them, these strange animals that were also their souls. She remembers nodding, a solemn thing, despite the questions bubbling up in the back of her mind.

It was worth it to keep quiet just to see the crease between her father’s eyebrows disappear.

Every mouse who’d come after the first Moushen had received his family name, even when he was a she. He gets no shortage of laughs, the little mouse on her hip – for even at eight, Byleth hears what the mercenaries say behind her back.

“She’s too young to be out on the field,” Jeralt’s friends murmur, staring warily at her sword. “Too young to be around all of this violence.”

Byleth makes her way out of the mercenary camp, content to wander through the woods away from the rest of the party. Beneath her fingers, Moushen squeaks again. She hushes him, then makes to part the tree branches blocking her way.

As long as she’s back before breakfast, Jeralt won’t mind that she’s gone. He never has before, anyway.

1171, Guardian Moon

“Captain?”

Byleth hates the quivering note in her voice. She clears her throat, tucks her hands behind her back, and makes eye contact with her father, who, thank fuck, only raises his eyebrows at her appearance.

“Captain,” she starts again, “can we talk, please?”

Jeralt glances around the mercenary camp, ignoring the way that several of the younger members stare. Byleth waits patiently for him to stand and join her, then drags him off into the woods where neither one of them can be seen. After a moment, Ursa joins the both of them, a fish still in her maw and a vaguely annoyed expression on her face.

“Byleth,” Jeralt says, deliberately keeping his voice low, “you remember what we talked about? You can call me ‘father’.”

Byleth doesn’t wince, per say; she presses her hands into her thighs, instead, and ignores the way she feels abruptly sweaty. “...father,” she says, trying again. “I spoke with Lancast the other day. About...growing older.”

Almost immediately, Jeralt flushes a distinct shade of red. “...was there any reason for this?”

Byleth takes a steadying breath. “Two reasons,” she says. “Lancast says that I’m getting older and that there are...things I should know about. Adult things.”

Jeralt groans and begins to massage the bridge of his nose. “ _Okay_ ,” he says. “Is there anything that Lancast...didn’t tell you about growing older?”

Byleth rubs the back of her neck. “...I know quite a bit,” she admits. “The next time we go to town, I’m going to need to pick a few things up, just to be careful. May I...borrow some of your funds to do so?”

Jeralt does not make eye contact and just nods, instead. “And the other thing?”

Here, Byleth’s voice grows even quieter. The weight of the newest Mousen on her hip seems to grow heavier.

“Why don’t I have a daemon, father?”

Finally, Jeralt looks up. Byleth’s expression doesn’t change away from its soft confusion, but her sitting guilt grows as his expression turns to hurt. He holds out his hand.

Byleth hesitates, then unhooks Moushen’s cage from her belt. Jeralt holds Moushen’s cage for a while, looking over...the tenth or eleventh Moushen in the line; even Byleth can’t quite remember.

“I don’t know for sure,” Jeralt admits, after a long stretch of silence. He passes Moushen back and watches as Byleth reaches into her hip pouch and feed him a cracker.

The story he tells her bleeds long into the early afternoon. Eventually, Byleth and her father leave their little clearing in favor of a proper hunt, keeping their voices low as they track a herd of deer through the light snow.

“You haven’t ever had a daemon, though,” Jeralt notes sometime later, the remains of a buck between the two of them. “You’ve never even asked questions before. What’s changed?”

Byleth bites her bottom lip and focused on the task at hand – trimming off the last of the deer’s hide for Garson back in camp. Ursa munches happily on another buck not far away, her back to her keeper and his daughter.

Finally, Byleth forces herself to look at her father. “Lancast told me,” she says, “that...I’m at the age where I’m becoming a woman.”

The strained look returns to Jeralt’s face.

“I thought,” Byleth continues, looking down at the buck, “that meant that I might...develop a daemon. With my bleeding. That it might...make me a person.”

She doesn’t see Jeralt’s expression cave from strained to sorrowful – and in earnest, she doesn’t want to. Instead, she continues to stare at her hands until Jeralt’s come forward to cover her own.

She looks up from the deer hide. Jeralt’s eyes are hard, but his grip on her wrists is nearly non-existent.

“You are already a person,” he insists, giving her wrists a small shake. “You don’t need a daemon to prove that. You are my daughter. You have a terrible sense of humor, a worse sense of timing, and...” he trails off, looking over her head and out towards the woods.

Byleth sees him blink before coming back to himself. “And your mother’s smile,” Jeralt finishes. “Even if we don’t see it all that often.”

Byleth feels the corner of her mouth twitch. It’s enough, she thinks, to drive some of the concern from her father’s face.

The feeling of warmth, though, is quick to disappear – suffocated as though by a blanket sitting in her soul. “Am I just...wrong, then?”

Jeralt sighs. “No,” he says, letting her wrists go. “Only different.”

“And we have to hide that difference,” Byleth continues for him, “in order to stay safe.”

Jeralt does not reply. Byleth studies the sharp angles of his face and wait for him to answer. Even after he opens his mouth, though, the words do not come.

At her hip, Moushen the Tenth or Eleventh squeaks. Byleth sticks a finger in between the gaps of the cage and gently scratches his side.

“...come on, kid,” Jeralt says, at last. He stands, then hoists the skinned deer up over his shoulders. “Let’s get back to camp.”

He doesn’t wait for her before leaving the clearing, disappearing into the noontime shadows of the woods, instead. Ursa lingers in the clearing, but she, too, eventually makes her way, leaving Byleth to the silence.

Byleth watches the both of them go. Once Ursa’s lumbering footsteps have grown quiet in the distance, she reaches down and gathers up the bow her father left behind.

It’s no hardship to catch up, and no difficulty to remain quiet as she does. Even so, Byleth, her father, and Ursa walk back to camp in silence.

When she knows neither one is looking, Byleth closes her eyes and listens – tries to listen past the thrum of her pulse into the ether where she is meant to have a heart.

No sound rises up to meet her.

1175, Blue Sea Moon

Battle.

It’s a nothing job; a meaningless job; an escort between Fodlan’s Locket and the Almyran mountains. Getting attacked is almost a guaranteed, meaning that mercenaries in the area are bound to make good money.

Jeralt’s band happens to get lucky.

The fight is quick. One moment, silence; the next, the flash of steel against steel as Fodlandi bandits leap out at a party on the road. Battle is the sound of her father’s voice echoing off the mountainside. Swearing and singing and the sound of animals snarling as, throughout the envoy, bandits and mercenaries alike collide, their daemons at their side.

Byleth moves quietly. A bandit all but throws himself onto her sword; she lets him slide away, ignoring the lifeless “thump” of the antelope at his side. There comes another; her mountain goat stumbles on the cliffside, then falls down to his death. There’s another; his hunting hawk stutters, mid-air, then spirals down to the ground.

Byleth does not know what to make of the dying daemons, of the sounds of battle, of the way the creatures inch towards their masters in the seconds they have before death. She does not linger to study them. Instead, she does as her father bids.

She puts one foot in front of the other, Moushen the Fifteenth at her side, and she fights.

Above all else, she wins.

1180, Great Tree Moon

There is a moment of quiet as the bandit’s axe comes down towards her head. A moment of peace.

And then –

the axe passes by her; Byleth disarms the bandit and sends him spinning onto the ground, where her father can aim his lance at his neck.

At her waist, the weight of Moushen the Eighteenth has vanished. When Byleth looks down, his cage is cleaved in two. Instead, something strange tugs at her wrist, cold and unfamiliar and – welcoming?

The strange voice in her head is singing with delight. The young woman behind her is saying...something, but it sounds like a thank you, cradling her hawk to her chest.

Byleth hears none of it. Instead, without a thought for her companions, she tears off her bracer and stares at the creature underneath.

It doesn’t make sense. Whatever it is, it is constantly shifting: one moment a snake, the next moment a ferret, the next a butterfly.

“Now that’s strange,” says the voice in her head. Byleth grinds her teeth and ignore it.

The creature slides up her arm and disappears into her sleeve; the sensation is foreign but not dangerous. Byleth closes her eyes, steadies herself, and thinks.

“A daemon?” echoes the voice in her head. She can feel this strange girl – a girl who’s always been her companion, really, but who’s never been quite this talkative – reach out and poke at the new invasion on Byleth’s arm. The girl pulls back and frowns, tucking one hand under her chin.

“It feels correct,” she says, stifling herself with a gargantuan yawn. “But you’ve never had a daemon before had you? I wonder why it’s appeared now.”

There’s no time to linger on the question. The few seconds she’s had to herself are immediately interrupted, first by the children she’s saved, then by her father. Subtly, Byleth fixes her bracer back into place, then makes eye contact with her father.

The expression he throws her way is pained – not worried, just exasperated. It only grows more so when the group of armored strangers come bursting out of the forest.

Ursa wanders over to her side, sniffing her cautiously. Without a thought, Byleth reaches out and scratches her behind her ears, listening as her father’s bear huffs in delight.

She doesn’t realize until too late that the children are staring.

“What?” she asks, exhaustion creeping into her trademark monotone.

It is the one in blue who comes to himself first – and he’s the prince, if she can remember their hasty introductions correctly. He steps forward, one awkward hand behind his head, doing his best, it seems, not to stare between Byleth and Ursa. The lion that walks with him bristles in discomfort, but she remains at his side, a warning and a friend all at once.

“I’ve never seen someone touch another person’s daemon so casually,” he says, glancing back towards his companions. “You and your father must be quite close.”

Byleth feels one of her eyebrows twitch upward.

“Oh, look at the girl!” the voice in her head whispers, suddenly quite awake. “I didn’t think she could get any paler, and oop – there she goes.”

“We...are,” Byleth says, a moment later than might be socially acceptable. The princeling nods, then turns back to his companions, asking after their health in what feels like an attempt to get their attention off of her. Despite herself, Byleth warms to him – a good man, it seems, despite the strange, stilted thing about his nature.

His lioness does not watch her the way the hawk and crow do. That alone feels like a blessing.

The girl in red – another princeling, or so she thinks – allows her attention to be directed elsewhere, paying her blue companion little mind as she starts towards the armored strangers.

It is only the boy in yellow, then, who seems to remember that she is there. Byleth makes eye contact with him when she is able, drawing her hand away from Ursa’s fur.

Almost at once, the creature now buried beneath her shirt shivers.

The boy grins at her and tucks both hands behind his head, forcing the bird to take flight and circle around sleeping Remire. Despite his nonchalance, Byleth can feel his crow – or is it a raven? – fix its eyes on her, watching her from somewhere in the distance.

“So, you must have done a lot of traveling as a mercenary’s daughter,” says the boy in yellow – Claude. His name is Claude. “What’s brought you to Remire?”

“Finishing up a job,” Byleth replies, trying to ignore the way her...daemon? itches against her skin. She waits, then raises an eyebrow as Claude stands in silence across from her.

Social niceties click a moment later. “And you?”

“Just traveling to the Officer’s Academy,” Claude says with a shrug. He glances over his shoulder towards her father, prompting Byleth to follow his gaze. Already she can sense her father’s discomfort, even as the man he’s greeting seems...unusually enthused.

When she looks back at Claude again, it’s to meet his knowing smile. “Looks like you might be coming with us,” he says, a cheeky thing. “Man, it must have been a treat growing up with the Bladebreaker as your father. If you’ve got some time on our trip, you’ll have to let me pick your brain.”

“I...sure,” Byleth agrees, her brow furrowing as she does. It’s an answer that’s satisfied him, it seems, because Claude only nods and grins before he starts to walk away. Byleth watches him go, then lets Ursa nudge her towards her father.

If she’s honest – and she rarely isn’t – she doesn’t want to go to this...Officer’s Academy. But this Alois has her father by the wrist, and his golden retriever is dancing happily at his feet; one look between father and daughter spells the next move for the both of them.

Jeralt pats her on the shoulder as he moves past her, then freezes in place. He looks at her – really looks at her – and has as quick of a wordless conversation with her as he can.

Byleth reaches up and grazes the back of his hand with her fingers as he carries on towards his men. Beneath her shirt, her daemon wriggles.

She watches as Jeralt moves among his men, passing out coin and leaving his aids with instructions. When she glances over her shoulder, it’s to see these strangers – both Alois and his daemon – watching them, eyes guileless and pleased.

Despite the distance between them, the children watch both her and her father with more scrutiny. Byleth narrows her eyes back as she catches them staring, bringing a wary hand up to her shoulder.

“My, my,” says the voice in her head. “How suspicious you are. Perhaps for the best, for I can’t think of any future involving those three that isn’t, at the least, interesting.”

1180, Guardian Moon

The world is dark. No matter where she looks, there is nothing in front of her; nothing below her; nothing – anywhere. Byleth feels a clench of fear fill her heart; waits for the sense of falling to hit her, but instead –

Nothing.

Nothing but Sothis, sitting on her throne. The little one glowers down at her, one fist pressed into her own cheek.

“What did you think you were doing?!”

(Impulsively, Byleth reaches for her wrist, but Wechseln is nowhere to be found).

“You are nothing but a boulder,” Sothis hisses, “rolling in whatever direction you are forced! You knew this was a trap; you knew Solon was baiting you, and what did you do? Exactly what he wanted! And now we’re trapped here in this darkness forever. How are you going to protect the little ones if you can’t even protect yourself?!”

The fear in Byleth’s heart deepens. She spins around again, trying to make sense of these surroundings, but there is nowhere to turn.

“I’m sorry.” The words are stolen from her, ripped from her lungs. When she turns back to Sothis, her eyes are burning; her chest feels ready to cave in on itself. “I’m so sorry.”

On her throne, Sothis sniffs. “Apologies do nothing here,” she says – but she’s stopped shouting, and that’s a good step. She peers about, tapping her fingers against her throne with an expression of pure impatience.

Hesitantly, Byleth takes a step towards the base of the dias. The urge to sink to her knees is almost overwhelming, but whether it’s out of exhaustion or deference, she cannot tell.

For the first time in her life, she lets the feeling take her. Sothis’s eyes go wide as she collapses, the Sword of the Creator skittering out of her hands.

“I’m sorry,” Byleth says again, her voice choked with feeling. “I am so sorry.”

Her body is shaking. Her fingers are twitching; she can feel this empty world pressing up against her.

Abruptly, there is a hand on her cheek. Byleth looks up to see Sothis’s face through a film of – tears?

(She hasn’t cried since her father died; this feels – blasphemous, in the same breath that it feels welcomed.)

Sothis is hesitant as she reaches out to stroke Byleth’s hair. Byleth leans into the touch, though, and lets the goddess hold her as they sit in the void together.

“We’ve done so much together, child,” Sothis says in her ear, her voice strangely soft. Byleth rests her forehead on this child’s shoulder. “I know the inner workings of your mind almost as well as I know my own. You are a danger to yourself with all of your good intentions; surely you know this?”

Byleth shakes her head, not daring to look up. “I need to keep them safe,” she says, her throat thick with sadness. She hesitates, some truth lingering on the tip of her tongue. “But I needed to keep you safe, as well.”

“Oh, child.” The grip Sothis has on her hair tightens. “You have it the wrong way around. If anyone was meant to protect anyone, it was I who owed that burden to you.”

The goddess pulls back, just a little, better allowing Byleth to see her small smile. “And now,” she says, “it will be your responsibility to protect yourself. Do you think you can do that for me?”

Byleth – blinks. Sniffles. Presses a hand close to her heart. “What do you mean?”

Sothis looks around their realm of darkness, then glances back at her glowing throne. It bears down on the both of them, that impossible thing, illuminated by a force Byleth cannot identify.

“I am the progenitor god,” Sothis tells her – though as she speaks, it seems more as though she is reminding herself. “I can imbue you with my power, child – and it seems I must, if we are to see our enemies laid before us. But I fear that without me in your ear, you will make mistakes – and what good am I to you if I cannot chide you?”

Despite herself, Byleth laughs. It is a wet sound that echoes for miles in this place, but it makes Sothis’s burgeoning smile grow.

Together, the two women make their way to their feet. Byleth struggles upright, then finds herself looking down at the goddess, now with her feet planted firmly on their invisible floor.

“Take up your sword, child,” the goddess commands.

Exhausted and tear-worn, Byleth does as she is told. The Sword of the Creator is a heavy burden in her palm.

Sothis looks up at her, her expression warmer than anything Byleth has seen before. Hesitantly, the goddess reaches out and takes Byleth’s free hand in her own.

“The past and the future are to be at your disposal, child,” she says at last, studying Byleth’s knuckles with care. “While I will no longer be at your side, it will be curious to see what you do to them – and with them, I suppose.”

“What – no.” The rusting gears of Byleth’s mind still turn; there is no mistaking the farewell that Sothis does not speak. “No. No. Do not leave me, Sothis, please!”

The goddess laughs – a quiet sound, a loving sound. “I am not leaving you, child,” she says, her voice carrying on some distant wind. The hand holding Byleth’s squeezes. “But you have the little ones to protect. My only wish is that, when we are together, you do not forget to protect yourself.”

Byleth’s tears disappear into the void, streaking down her cheeks only to float in the nothingness.

“Prepare to cut through the darkness,” Sothis instructs her. Fireflies – or things like fireflies, Byleth cannot tell – gather at her feet and flow between the two of them, binding them like chains.

“I love you,” Byleth whispers, squeezing her eyes shut.

“And I, you,” the goddess says, laughter in her voice. There is a moment’s silence, and then a sharp warmth brimming in Byleth’s chest – one that rapidly grows hot and nearly overwhelming.

Sothis’s joy fills her mind – time itself riquoches around her, spilling out of her fingertips even as the Sword of the Creator springs to life.

And in her mind, the last thing Byleth hears is her dear friend’s voice – happy, mournful, and powerful in a way it never has been before.

“Say hello to Wechseln for me, won’t you?” the goddess bids. “I only wish I could have met him properly.”

On instinct alone, Byleth brings the sword down against the darkness. She does not have time to wipe the tears from her cheeks; as she passes back into the wider world, she does not even realize that they are there.

***

The purple mist hasn’t faded by the time Claude arrives at the piazza. He rushes the center, heart pounding in his chest, only to be thrown back from the perimeter by a force that he cannot comprehend.

He lands hard. For a moment that feels so much longer than it is, he’s left staring up into the tree canopy, trying to make sense of the candy-colored sky. Above his head, he can hear Robin screaming his name, but the cadence of it gets lost in her panic.

Then, Lorenz is at his back, dismounting his horse and helping him to his feet. He can feel the touch of Marianne’s healing magic from her long ways away; can hear Hilda shouting his name, though it sounds as though she’s underwater.

And all around him, there’s a chorus of questions, a cry coalescing into a single thought:

“Claude?” Lorenz says, his voice drawn high and tight. “What happened to the professor?” Alexandria stares down at him, too, her eyes wide with the panic that her keeper will not let himself reveal.

Claude closes his eyes. Swallows the blood in his mouth. Straightens his shoulders.

When he opens his eyes again, it’s to see the empty piazza in front of him. Birds take to the air as Tomas – no, as the monster they’re facing starts to laugh. The low sound builds from somewhere deep in the earth, then grows, and grows, and grows.

Seconds pass.

Teach – Byleth does not return.

Claude locks the growing panic in his breast down, wrapping it in chains and sinking it somewhere near his stomach. Leaning on Lorenz, he stands, then starts gesturing to the Golden Deer who’ve gathered close around him.

There are tears. He can see Marianne shaking, her arms thrown around her wolf-dog; can see Leonie’s pale face standing out against the greenery around them, Ulysses standing useless at her feet.

Their time, though, is limited.

The one good thing about all this – if it even can be called a good thing – is that Solon is too busy gloating to notice the Golden Deer moving into position.

Lorenz and Alexandria head to the east; Leonie and Raphael to the west. Claude quietly orders both Lysithea and Marianne back alongside Ignatz, who does his best to quietly comfort the both of them.

Hilda and Fonzie come to stand at his side as Robin lands on his shoulder. Her expression, for once, is stoic and unreadable, though Claude can see tears in her eyes.

“Ready when you are, Leader Man,” she says under her breath, her eyes fixed on Solon.

Claude inhales.

Steadies himself.

Exhales.

And signals.

Lysithea makes a complex motion with her hand, and the barrier around the piazza falls. Raphael leads the charge with a furious roar that is echoed by Cassandra as well as Leonie. Lorenz is silent in his approach, but Claude can feel the air change as magic gathers in his hands.

Hilda and Fonzie rush forward.

Claude drops to one knee. He doesn’t say anything as his arrow flies past Hilda’s head, but Robin flies with it, striking Solon in the forehead with her talons just after Claude’s arrow hits him in his good eye.

It all takes less than a heartbeat. Lorenz flies off of his horse; Raphael drops to his knees; Leonie skitters back, the head of her lance shattering –

Marianne’s magic fills the air –

and Claude tastes something dark and wet and cool on his tongue.

The world behind Solon shifts. A dark cut appears, then lengthens, then cracks.

The sound of bone scrapping against bone echoes across the piazza. Solon, eye wounded, body heaving, collapses onto the ground, falling onto the arrow Claude embedded in his eye.

The laughter that once shook the ground rapidly gives way to screaming.

Above him, the Sword of the Creator in her hands, stands a woman. She snarls something unintelligible – something in a language that Claude does not know (and that the land of Fodlan has not heard in several hundred years). She does not wait for her opponent to respond; instead, the Sword of the Creator twists in her grip, and she drives it down into the magician’s back.

Claude watches as Solon heaves his last. Robin, moving to come and settle on his shoulder, stops and whirls back, circling the newcomer with no little fear and apprehension.

Someone shouts.

With a flick of her wrist, the newcomer bats an arrow out of the air; Leonie, with her bow drawn, stumbles backwards, her eyes wide.

The gouge in the air starts to seal itself shut.

Claude looks at the woman and studies the planes of a face he knows he’d recognize even in the dark; a face that will stay with him for years.

Mint eyes – and they used to be blue, a steadying, reassuring blue – stare back.

An instant before the wound in the world seals, something fast and wicked comes spinning out of it. The Golden Deer still on their feet gasp; the air goes tight as, again, Claude feels Lysithea prepare one of her spells.

The creature circles the piazza once, then comes to settle on Byleth’s shoulders. It is, for a moment, unspeakably large, its wingspan spreading out behind her like a halo. Then, it settles, seeming almost to shrink as Byleth lets the Sword of the Creator come to rest at her side.

Claude clears his throat. Opens his mouth. Can’t find his voice.

The piazza grows silent.

And then –

“Professor?”

He cannot tell if it is Lysithea or Leonie who speaks first, but it is Lysithea who breaks rank and runs across the piazza. Byleth’s face shifts as the girl approaches; she looks – stunned as Lysithea throws herself into her professor’s arms, wailing at the top of her lungs. Kristoff comes with her, circling the professor’s feet as the noise finally breaks the spell.

The Golden Deer and their daemons flock to the professor’s side, a cascade of noise and cheering and tears.

Only Leonie and Claude linger behind.

Claude looks over to his...friend, on the other side of the piazza. She’s dropped her bow at her feet and pressed her hands over her mouth; tears are pouring down her cheeks, though she doesn’t seem to feel them.

Claude’s knuckles are white around his own weapon. He cannot bring himself to get up off of his knees.

The crowd around Byleth doesn’t part, but it’s clear, even at a distance, that she’s aware of the uneasiness in the air. With Lysithea’s arms still around her waist, she gently carves a path forward. The woman herself moves towards Leonie, only going still when her student takes a wary step back.

Her daemon, though, moves towards Claude.

Claude does not shoot at the creature approaches; rather, with a nod of his head, he has Robin meet him in the air. The two birds settle in the branches of a tree nearby, examining one another with a kind of stiff gentleness. Robin’s puffed her feathers so she’s doubled in size, but even so, she cannot best Wechseln for breadth.

For a long minute, the two birds consider one another. Across the field, Claude watches as Leonie collapses into Byleth’s arms.

Finally, he hears the birds take flight. Robin lands on his shoulder while Wechseln circles over his head, his dark blue feathers glinting in sharp contrast to the setting sun.

“Claude,” the owl clicks, his voice...deeper than Claude expects (almost reminiscent of Jeralt’s). Claude startles, pulling his bow close to his chest, only to chide himself for this overwrought display. He straightens just a second too late but grins at the over-large owl anyway.

“Wechseln, I presume?” he calls out.

The owl does not linger but does make another lazy loop around Claude’s head. Then, he’s off and settling on Byleth’s shoulders, his wings a crown around her head.

They’re upright for maybe a few seconds longer before Byleth’s grip on Leonie goes slack. There’s a general scream from the crowd as both Byleth and Wechseln fall limp on the ground.

Claude runs.

He doesn’t remember getting to his feet or pushing his way through the crowd, but in between one blink and the next, he’s down on the ground. He looks around, then lights on Hilda. Despite the terror in her eyes, she crosses her arms over her chest and shakes her head.

Claude turns to Raphael, instead. “Let’s get her back to the monastery,” he says. Raphael and Cassandra nod as one, then scoop the professor up and off the ground.

For a long moment, no one dares to touch Wechseln. Then, Marianne moves out of the crowd and gently lifts the owl daemon up into her arms.

Wechseln does not shift.

Claude feels bile start to rise up in his throat, but he forces it back down again. “Lorenz, Leonie,” he says, rising to his feet. “Ride ahead and let Professor Manuela know that we’re coming. Raphael, take her straight to the infirmary, no matter who tries to stop you. Lysithea,” he adds, a sudden burst of worry settling in his chest, “go with him. If anyone tries to stop you, Dark Spike them, then send them to me.”

The Golden Deer...pause. Claude takes stock of the situation, then manages a shadow of a cheeky smile. “What, did you think the title of ‘House Leader’ was just for show? Get moving!”

A few faces in the crowd relax, though not as many as he’d like. After a beat, at least, his fellow deer do as he says. It is Lorenz lingers for longer than he should while Leonie scrambles for her horse, Ulysses right on her heels. Claude sees on of his hands rise, as though Lorenz means to clap him on the shoulder, but it just as quickly drops away.

The cavaliers ride ahead, with Raphael and Lysithea following just behind. Marianne moves more slowly with Wechseln in her arms, but she’s still far enough ahead of the rest of them that Claude loses track of her forget-me-not hair.

(He doesn’t know what the consequences of touching Wechseln will be; he only hopes they’ll have an opportunity to find out.)

After a few minutes of silent walking, Claude feels Hilda press up against his side.

“Well that was an event,” she says, forcing energy into her voice. Behind her, Claude hears Ignatz let out a nervous laugh.

Claude shakes his head, an unwilling, honest smile stealing onto his face. “It’s a day no one’s going to forget, that’s for sure,” he agrees. On his shoulder, Robin clicks her beak and shifts, her talons digging into his skin.

In his ear, her voice is no more than a whisper. “I just wish all of this made sense.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
